The Cafe Review, a lovely print journal based in Maine has published one of my poems — Tumblehome.
The Cafe Review, a lovely print journal based in Maine has published one of my poems — Tumblehome.
Trampoline has published two of my poems – Body Retrieval and How Life After Returning Home Makes You Up.
The American Journal of Poetry has published two of my poems: Monocle and Rose Of Sharon.
Trampoline, a literary journal based in New Orleans, has published a couple of my poems: CAT Scan and First Light.
Parhelion has published a selection of some of my new poems.
I was invited to read some of my poems for the 20th anniversary celebration of the Attic Institute for Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. This poem is called Medic and is part of a manuscript I’ve been working on called Thicket of Arrows.
Palette Poetry has published one of my poems — Commercial Fisherman.
The Alba Journal of Short Poetry has published one of my poems — Loafing. It took me a long time to realize that a poem does not need to end — it only needs to persist in its argument.
One day recently my friends Steve and Cathy asked me if I would teach their grandsons, ages nine and eleven, some basics about writing poetry. They were being homeschooled by their mom during the Covid-19 epidemic — so I created some lessons. I sent them out in the morning and we met over Zoom at the end of the day to discuss the lesson and read people’s poems out loud. It went so well, I thought I would make the lessons available to others as a workbook. Kids Write Poetry – A Workbook for Young Poets is my way of serving the community during a difficult time.
Here is the first lesson as an example:
Lesson 1:
Poems are built from pieces: words and lines are the two basic building blocks. The goal of the first exercise is to make one line poems that tell a story. A story can be suggestive and not necessarily have a beginning, middle and end. One-line poems can sketch an idea. Sometimes the sketch-style poems are the most interesting ones. Here are some examples of one-line poems from one of the masters, the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos:
I erase the shadow completely with this gold pencil.
The night always behind my pages. That’s why my letters shine so brightly.
Your clothes, thrown on the chair, still smell of the sea.
To speak constantly about wrong things is like being wrong.
Notice how his lines do not always make sense in the conventional way. Poems are interesting when they put things together in new ways. Don’t worry about it making sense or not. Your brain will always make its own sense of things anyway. We are meaning making creatures. The best poems can often be read or interpreted in multiple ways. Also notice how his lines are built from interesting physical objects combined with actions that are unexpected. You don’t expect, when reading about clothes on a chair to have them smell like the sea! How cool is that!
First assignment: write ten one line poems in the style of Yannis Ritsos. You can use physical objects from your own life as a starting place, or just start from imagination, which is as real as anything in the so-called real world anyway. Don’t worry about making sense!! Write a few where they seem to make very little sense, even if they are just a list of things. Also, make it fun. You write for your own enjoyment and for strangers.
So for example, I am looking at my very messy desk right now. Here are some things I see and some other things they bring to mind:
Two used containers of ant bait. A family portrait.
Piles of stuff everywhere. I wish I could staple my life back together.
Good luck!
You can download it here: Kids Write Poetry – A Workbook for Young Poets.
I was prepared to hate it / well, hate is a strong word /
let’s just say give it wings and let it sail past the bridge
/ but it doesn’t suck / it doesn’t pretend to get on its knees
and make the rafters sing / it is a red owl on a bicycle with hungry eyes /
“Who isn’t bruised around the edges, peaches poured
into the truck bed, receipts faded to white?”
it sends out science mannikins to shout about being nervous in secret /
it collaborates with machines to make rain squalls / it argues for
a better kind of blindness / it warns others about dreaming in stairwells
and at crime scenes / it is a crime scene painted in butterscotch broth /
“The cop speaks and I call a plum into is his mouth
and it doesn’t shut him up.
The cop kneels in the grass below my friends, my friends
crowned with August and Salt. My marigold my wave.”
tendrils and tips and sprockets combine to give it firm plant awareness /
“cyborg means man made” I didn’t know / it is like new sounds added
to frost in the stubble by the road / in a Wyoming winter snow drifts
come and go like grainy herds of buffalo / this book is like those herds
mated with seigniorage — the profit made from the minting of coins /
ducats in the pillow / francs thrown into the Seine / everything costs
what you are willing to throw away / this book is completely free
in that sense / it is madly lyrical / and worth your time.
Note: this review is for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. Soft Science
is forthcoming from Alice James books.
Work Literary Magazine has published two more of my poems about labor:
Hanford 1944
Logger
Work literary magazine has published three of my poems about work.
Tower Worker – West of Mt. Hood
Sex Worker in Shinjuku
Road Work
Posted in poetry, PublishedPoems
Venice is burning!
Come closer to me
Venice is writhing in light
boats, flags, the dukes palace
all under watery sun spray
spectral and cloud real
Posted in poetry
sails tearing, stern lights going out
waves like vermin
overflowing rails and decks
Yoshibei leaps into the sea
Posted in poetry
“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.”
–Albert Camus, 1957
Posted in poetry
A late February snow has
the near world in its sequester
At Starbucks the barista imitates
a bird calling across the water
Posted in poetry, SelectedPoems
The Package was first published in print by Poetry Quarterly.
The bedspread
has animal dialogs
It shudders and sweats
spreading its fretwork
across the cordillera
The smooth places are made
into mussels and rock crabs
and the hard places are made
into deer and antelope
Leather, pine and sea salt
join with resin and marsh hawks
to make the world we see
From scuffles under the window
comes the light above the hemline
and the occupation of Paris
and Lascaux cave art and the sphinx
tongue as thick as a buffalo
Painted stick dancers
clothed in blood and teeth
and ocher and foam
brought us today, delivered
in a Fedex package:
a dish of blue eels
and ammonites
and slave songs
and mile-deep diamonds
and the lungs of kings
Posted in poetry, PublishedPoems
Storm Over Houston was first published by Clementine Unbound.
A shadow props up the gutted barn
where we spent the night.
To be keen all the time–not to swerve,
ten minutes out of every hour,
is enough most days.
A man with boulders in his soul,
a dock trying to hold onto
it’s string of boat horses,
a bone-drenched woman
with praise for a God
who was as stealthy as a barn cat.
Out on the highway
no sound now,
as if someone
had picked them all up
from a skiff with a pruning hook
and put them in a sack.
Today we became the rulers
The public, rusted-out
and scattered like tombstones
American carnage
This sad depletion our country
disappeared over the horizon
America first!
The ravages, stealing and destroying
will lead to great prosperity and strength
I will never, ever let you win
Radical Islamic Terrorism
the bedrock of our politics
Total allegiance
Open your heart to patriotism
Now arrives the empty hour of action
Our soldiers will bleed
the same red blood
and be ignored again
Posted in poetry, SelectedPoems0